Sylvain et Lola

 

They couldn’t be more different:

Sylvain in his sixties and Lola, her twenties

 

But each has known trauma.

 

The older trauma was the younger’s.

Just a child of ten,

Not sure what was happening when

Lola watched his mother go through a “violent depression”.

Could he lose her? – What would happen then?

 

His mum did come through that traumatic time for her, and for him.

 

Sylvain – the violence came much more literally and suddenly

And more recently (sadly homophobia is not dead).

 

Out of nowhere, he was set upon by thugs who threw him to the ground,

Hurled homophobic slurs at him while they kicked and hit his dancer legs with iron bars.

Not young, Sylvain feared for his life.

 

As the two shared their hardest times,

you could tell that the telling was to some degree a reliving

of those awful moments – and tears were not far away.

 

Yet the telling and the tears

both for themselves and for each other

were healing and strengthening.

 

As the two shared their hardest times,

Lola and Sylvain found a solidarity

And they agreed that tough as those experiences were,

They both emerged stronger.

 

Context

Watching Drag Race France – Season three – the sixth episode was a make-over challenge where the contesting queens were assigned an older LGBT person to makeover into a drag character to walk the runway with them. Lola Strega (drag name) was assigned to make-over Sylvain. The poem is about the conversation the two had while Lola did Sylvain’s make-up.